Evolution of a moustache

Last month I grew a moustache. It was fundraising, honest, but more importantly it allowed me to establish exactly how long I take to grow a moustache, as opposed to just bumfluff.
Answer: 20 days, with real Tom Selleck properties kicking in around day 25.

While it was important for me to establish this duration, I don't think I will be entering Movember again any time soon. Pictorial history in reverse below. And yes there was trimming, otherwise the facial hair looks bad.

Day 30, on day release. Probably my pick of the pictures.

















Day 30, intellectual look.














Day 25. The horror, the horror. Oh so itchy.













Day 20. This was about the point at which I became alarmed at how comfortable I was with said facial hair.













Day 15. Serious lateral coverage emerging here, in great need of trimming down to size.














Day 10. No real effort exerted yet. Given that my current winter shaving frequency is Sundays, this is equivalent to me forgetting to shave once.

Fore rib of beef - this steak is all man, all the time

Last night I cooked a beef fore rib. The best way to describe this hunk of manliness: a 900 gram mutant steak, with a bone in it for extra caveman points. It is the first steak I have carved, rather than cutting....
Before photo, with beverage can for perspective:

















And after photo. This monster is so big that I had to give it five mins each side in the pan, before baking for another quarter of an hour. And after that it was still medium rare all the way through.

















Served with anchovy & parsley butter, frites, & green salad. Next time (oh yes, there will definitely be a next time) I think I will rest the steak longer - the hunt for the perfect steak continues.

Migration to and from New Zealand

A while back I read something on Kiwiblog talking about the reduction in New Zealanders moving overseas.

So what exactly are the drivers underlying New Zealand’s migration?

New Zealanders leaving and returning

I produced graph (1) below from Statistics New Zealand Infoshare data, which shows permanent or long term migration to and from New Zealand, for New Zealand citizens, by quarter for the period 1980 to date.
I have used blue to indicate arrivals into NZ, green to indicate departures from NZ (shown as a negative figure), and brown to indicate net migration of New Zealanders.










One thing which jumps out of this graph is that migration into New Zealand by New Zealand citizens (ie the return of the diaspora) has remained constant for the past thirty years, fluctuating seasonally between 5,000 and 10,000 migrants per quarter.
Thus New Zealanders’ net migration is driven entirely by emigration from New Zealand. I can see three waves of migration in the past thirty years in graph (1), illustrated by my black arrows:
a) 1983-89 post Muldoon , ‘can the last to leave NZ turn the lights out’,
b) 1991-2001, and
c) 2003-2008.
I don’t know enough economic history to posit reasons behind the latter two waves, but it looks like the third wave of migration has abated and the net position is heading back toward zero net migration.
Interestingly, net migration has not stayed positive for more than one quarter at a time at any point since 1980. Thus, over the past thirty years New Zealanders have consistently left New Zealand (as a net position), the only variable has been how many have left in any given quarter.

So is New Zealand’s migration driven by New Zealanders leaving? In a word: partially.

Foreign citizens moving to New Zealand and subsequently emigrating

Graph (2) below shows permanent or long term migration to and from New Zealand, for non-New Zealand citizens (foreign citizens), by quarter for the period 1980 to date.











Here, the number of foreign citizens leaving New Zealand has remained constant, roughly, with 5,000 to 6,000 departures per quarter over the last five years. A example of this behaviour would be migrating to New Zealand and then migrating to Australia four years down the track, due to Australia’s tougher entry requirements from the original country.
The variance in net migration is driven by foreign citizens arriving in New Zealand, with two distinct waves:
a) 1991-1996, and
b) 1999-2002.

Thus we have two strong and highly fluctuating drivers on net migration: New Zealanders leaving the country, and foreign citizens. Which of these is stronger? Graph (3) shows these two migration flows, and their net effect (in brown)











The net effect here (brown line) is highly variable over the past thirty years, and over the last five years this net effect has been roughly equal to zero.

To get back to the original point:

Yes, there has been a marked slowdown in New Zealanders migrating overseas in the past few months. However, this has been cancelled out by an opposing slowdown in foreign citizens migrating to New Zealand.
So, the net migration effect (brown line in graph 3) is roughly equal to zero.

As an example of how this might impact 'ordinary' New Zealanders: If you are looking for a driver behind NZ house prices remaining high, migration is not it. Less New Zealanders are leaving NZ, so this could theoretically increase demand for housing stock. However less foreign citizens are entering NZ, so this would theoretically decrease demand for housing stock.
Net effect on housing due to migration= zero.

Take my breath away....

No reason...

Things which make me smile

1) Coming home to hot pizza and cold wine on the table, and Team America on the box.

2) Seeing the following on my walk to work yesterday:
a) A homeless man doing quite a good robot dance in Trafalgar Square.
b) A man carrying what I can only describe as a mannequin head, where the mannequin is a gorilla. The gorilla mannequin head was adorned with heart shaped sunglasses. The man was stroking the head as he walked along.
c) An elderly couple walking arm in arm, dressed smartly, smiling. When I saw them I immediately wanted to be that guy. Not right now, in 40 years I mean.

US recession and US/UK average hours worked - wonk wonk

To continue on from the previous post about the UK economy, I thought I would see if the US economy was doing any better. Short non-wonky answer: no.

The official US unemployment rate rose last period to 9.5%. This is the highest official employment rate since 1983. You think that is bad? This ignores both underemployed people (ie people employed part time who want to work full time) and job seekers who have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work. So exactly how deep and long is this recession? Calculated Risk have produced the following easy to read graph which I have copied to illustrate my next two points.















Depth of employment recession

The current US employment recession (red line) is the second deepest since WW2 in terms of recession from prior peak employment, with employment around 4.7% less than December 2007.

The only recession which went deeper was 1948 (navy blue line), and that recession rebounded back to prior peak employment in 22 months, so four months on from this point in time. I don’t know enough post WW2 US economic history to comment as to why the 1948 recession rebounded so quickly, but some kind of post war stimulus seems to be the answer here – maybe the Korean War and the start of the Cold War arms race.

If you look at the trajectory of the red line, there is no way this current recession is going to return to prior peak employment in the next four months, instead it will probably overtake the 1948 recession to become the deepest post WW2 recession.

Length of employment recession

The second thing which strikes me about this graph is the length of time which recent recessions have taken to return to prior peak employment. The 1990 recession (black line) took 30 months to return to prior peak employment, and the 2001 recession (brown line, popping of dot com bubble) took 46 months or just under four years to return to prior peak employment.

Economists describe this lag as a jobless recovery. The recovery is driven by productivity improvement or technological advancement rather than increases in number employed, which is basically the worst possible outcome for anyone remaining unemployed. GDP recovers and becomes positive again, so prices & rents begin to increase again, but the employment market still lags behind its prior peak employment.

Again, if you look at the trajectory of the red line, this current employment recession shows no signs of bottoming out any time soon, let alone returning to December 2007 levels. This current recession could outlast the 2001 in terms of length to become the longest post WW2 recession, but at this stage (18 months on from prior peak employment)

So how do you pick when an economy has bottomed out, and unemployment is about to abate?
One potential indicator is average hours worked. If companies want to increase their output at te end of a recession, their first response won't be to hire new staff in case the recession keeps going. Rather, the company will increase the hours worked by their existing staff.
So what is happening with US/UK average hours worked? Well, both the UK and UK governmental statistics bureaux have nice data mining interfaces, and the respective graphs for average hours worked over the period 1999 to date are as follows:



The US average hours worked isn't moving upward at all, so no pleasure here.





The UK average hours worked has curved up slightly, but it is only a movement from 36.6 hours in the three months finishing March 09 to 36.9 hours in the three months finishing May 09. I would call this statistical noise.



End of wonk.

Whoever said 'trust your gut instinct' didn't have my abdomen

Aargh, why is my gut instinct wrong in so many ways.

In a previous post, I had argued that
a) the dip in London employment caused by the current recession would be over by end of next year, and
b) the employment recovery in London would be driven by development from the Olympics and miscellaneous infrastructure works such as Crossrail.
Do you want to guess how my arguments stacked up against professional forecasters? That’s right, zero from two.

As part of my trains role I get access to forecasting data from Oxford Economics UK. I thought I would slice and dice this data to test my statements above.
Central London Employment for the period 2005-2018 according to OEF can be graphed below. (I haven’t quite worked out how to present graphs properly in Blogger, so excuse presentation formatting and double click on graph if too small.)

Peak employment occurred in the second quarter of 2008, and the trough of the recession will occur in the second quarter of 2011.
So my first argument, that the employment drop will bottom out by the end of 2010, is in error. Result.
One other thing to note is that employment will not return to peak 2008 levels until 2016, a lag of nearly eight years.

My second argument was that employment recovery in London will be driven by infrastructure development. If my argument is true, then we would see a surge in transport employment over the period 2008-2012, or possibly construction employment.
The graph below shows Central London Employment for selected industries, for the period 2004 to 2018. Both construction (dark green) and transport & communications (light green) are essentially static over the selected period. Thus my second argument is wrong too.
Business services (brown) rebounds to its 2008 peak by 2014, while financial services (blue) does not recover to its 2008 peak until after 2018. One of the only sectors which is recession proof is Health and education (orange), which is not too surprising.

Moral of the story: If you want to enter the financial services sector at any point in the next ten years, forget it and work in health or education instead.

So what drives the recovery? Business services.
If you look closely at this graph, you will see that I had to put Business Services on a secondary axis (y axis to 900k instead of 400k) to make the picture meaningful. Sure, London has other sectors, but Business Services provides 40% of Central London Employment so other sectors are far less important.

Now all I have to do is find a forecast of equivalent quality for New Zealand / Wellington to chew on.

Amaaaazing skills

Enjoy. I could try and explain how I came across the video above, but it gets a bit convoluted and involves a graffiti website I stumbled across while reading up on the new Hitachi 395 domestic high speed trains running out of St Pancras.

Someone in the bowels of the BBC has a sense of sarcasm

Just watching The Apprentice (BBC version). Don't judge me. Too much.

Anyway, one of the contestants just got introduced, with the gentle background theme music being Prodigy. Specifically, the intro to Smack My Bitch Up before the vocals kick in, so only 2% of the audience would have gotten the reference.

Ahahaha, this is up there with the time that TV3 used Shihad's Wait and See (below) as their theme song for one of their election night specials. Except better by a factor of infinity.



PS I should mention that the Prodigy music video is extremely Not Safe For Work, so don't go looking for it.

Man crush part two

I started a new job in Victoria yesterday, so an hour's walk from the NE side of central London to the SW side. This means I walk through Covent Garden at 8am as all the traders rouse themselves, good times.

Today Miracle Sun came on my phones as I was wandering along, and it just felt right.
I am not erudite enough to fully explain why, go read epicurean deal maker if you need to read something written by people who write smart, this Don McGlashan song just worked for me.
I have previously revealed my man crush so this is just more of the same.
Even so, I challenge you to listen to this and tell me I should prefer Dave Dobbyn.....

Adjusted NZ unemployment up to 5.0%

Image taken from Stats NZ Household Labour Force Survey March 2009

The bold line in the graph above shows New Zealand's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate. The big thing here is that unemployment has increased to 5.0% at March 09, up from 3.8% a year earlier.

This creates a strong incentive for Marie and I to stay in the UK for the new wee while, as the NZ recession is likely to outlast the UK recession. I can't provide a robust analysis backing this up, but a combination of Olympics regeneration efforts plus multi billion pound infrastructure investment means that the London economy should rebound reasonably soon (ie within the next year or so). Just so long as you don't work in banking, that industry might take a little longer. Plus I have an offer for a bells and whistles civil service perm job, go trains.

A secondary incentive for us to remain is the NZ housing market. I don't think the housing market bubble is anywhere near finished, but this stage I can't offer hard data, just conjecture and anecdotes.
It seems like the Wellington housing market is being artificially propped up by expatriates who have returned in the last year from overseas with mortgage deposits.
This influx of solvent buyers willing to purchase at current market prices has propped up house sale prices.
However the numbers of expatriates is not unlimited, so soon there will be a reduced number of buyers returning from overseas.
Thus the Wellington housing market will soon face a fall in buyer demand, so prices will soften.

Someone with more knowledge states that the propping up of NZ house prices from returning expatriates is a myth, with migration flows strongest from India, the Phillipines and South Africa. He forecasts an increase in unemployment to 8% and a dramatic fall in house prices.

So there you have it. A pessimistic summary of the 300 words above is that there are no jobs and a housing implosion waiting to happen in New Zealand. An alternate viewpoint is that we should wait out the NZ recession from the far side of the world, and engage in some cultural tourism while we are here.
On that note, we are off to Jersey this weekend to watch Eurovision in the only gay bar on the island, preceded by a live appearance by Nikki French - one of Britain's all time worst Eurovision entries. Good times.

WTF: Overheard doctors

Last night in the UCH A&E department

Doctor 1, talking about a recent patient: He is the one who came in with the dog bite.
Doctor 2: At least dog bites are clean.
Doctor 1: Cleaner than humans.
Me, minding my own business in the corner: [Brain implodes]

Humour from people funnier than me: text messages I have received

Someone pointed me in the direction of overheard everywhere.

For some reason I immediately thought of the random musings I have been sent by text message over the years. Sometimes someone sends me a text message which is so amusing that I keep it in my cellphone for future reference. The oldest message I kept in my phone simply said "Am about to have sex", which I kept for four years. The message was sent at 743am. The only reason I don't still have it is that I lost my phone. From my current archives, in no particular order:

'Cheers dude. Ive just had a disasterous trip to the shop. Im not leaving this party until I can.' Received 2pm.
'Im back and dying on the couch'. Received two hours later.

'I just had the best tube announcement: if you want to stop between tower hill and gloucester road... This tube will take you!' Received 730pm, I think this was after a Waitangi Day circle line pub crawl.

'Got so Pissed last night i can't feel my face! What time are you arriving?' Received 1pm. I had arrived.

'Um. Sure. New bathroom. Nice' In response to me asking if I could visit for a weekend.

'I still have my sweet heart though as our tolerance and drive thin our trousers grow bigger as does our love. Some cats can do relations big nuts is still boffing sharon from milan.' I sent this to myself for some reason.

'If anyone knows where the petrol cap button is on a Merc A Series or [is] near a web connect[ion], please can u ring me and tell me where it is!'

Bad Cover versions of Great Songs : I

Sometimes when I hear a cover version of a song, I wonder 'why did they do that?'
This might be because the cover is a completely faithful replica of the original, which doesn't add to my musical body of knowledge, or because the cover version omitted my favourite part of the original song - such as backing vocals or orchestration.

Then there are those cover versions which take everything that is holy about a great song and deconsecrate it, before throwing the remnants in a toilet and taking a giant poo to show who's the boss. After eating corn for lunch.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Novospace covering beds are burning. This German techno outfit made a multi album career out of covers of successful 1980s songs, including this one.

What is so abominable about this cover version, I hear you ask?
a) The original is a great Aussie rock song, which has been bastardised into a Eurodance single which sounds just like every other Eurodance single. Now don't get me wrong, I like my cheesy techno, but why does it have to be based on music I like, thus debasing my enjoyment of the original?
b) The original was written in protest at the Australian government's treatment of the Aborigines. Midnight Oil performed this song at the 2000 Olympics, dressed all in black with Sorry written across their backs. The cover is sung by people who don't appear to understand what they are singing.

I wouldn't be angry if they covered a crap original song. But why take a great song and strip it of everything meaningful? Original below:

One Nation under CCTV addendum

As an addendum to my earlier post on surveillance, I have belatedly noticed a much better written post at Public Address on the same topic. I knew there was a reason I was reluctant to register my Oyster card.

PS there is a pub up the road from our place where the landlord is in a spot of bother for refusing to install CCTV in his pub. And, I see that there are more cameras around Kings Cross than I thought, 642 to be precise...

PPS I was surprised by how many London landmarks I recognised in the following Pet Shop Boys video, does this mean I am going native:

Don McGlashan is a demigod

Don McGlashan is the greatest pop artist in New Zealand. A big call, but I think I can back up my hyperbole.


I will not let you down, off his album Warm Hand. For some reason this song in particular always has an effect on me, which is independent of its sterling use in movie soundtracks.

We went to see him a few weeks back, and it was mesmerising. I have seen him before a few times, but this time was way more intimate - just 50 people in a tiny Soho basement dive and him alone on stage. He played all my favourites (while you sleep, envy of angels, thing well made), and the nice thing about these three not being pop anthems was that no one sang along. Pet peeve averted...

his stage presence is incredible. It was just him on stage with a guitar and euphonium, and he was able to recreate songs like envy of angels with just a couple of loop pedals. His voice is in astonishing condition - he is 49 and still has all his high notes in chest voice. The clip below gives an idea of what I am talking about, it shows his musicality (and charismatic humour, which never goes amiss):


So that is his stage presence and general level of musicianship. Next, songwriting. Most of the music on the radio I can transcribe in my head, I-IV-V etc. Not to talk myself up, the majority of pop music chord patterns are not that complex. Not so Don McGlashan, his chords are sexy. (Which means I have outed myself as a complete music nerd, but you knew that already).

Finally, lyrics. From the opening of Thing well made:

She's wearing her don't talk to me face as she makes the kids' lunches
I oblige and quietly close the back door as I leave
I drive into town before the fog lifts
I sell sporting goods - I've got a shop not far from Cathedral Square
I like to open up early so fellas can come in on their way to work
And daydream around the rods and reels
while their breakfast's still warm inside them
Why don't you take a look.
I'm proud of my shop.
Almost everything's from overseas - you won't find a better selection

So there we have it, the holy trinity of stage presence/musicianship, songwriting, and lyrics. I accept that there may be other New Zealand pop artists who do one of these crafts as well as Don McGlashan. But no one else has all three.

Plus,for those who like men, I am told by reliable and multiple sources that Don McGlashan is one of the few examples of a hot male ginger, and that he has become hotter with age. We are not talking Jonas Brothers underage pretty boy looks, this is craggy/weathered man hotness. Apparently.If you're into it.